December 7, 2011 – 5:55 pm
President Obama gave a rousing speech for his base yesterday in Osawatomie, Kansas: a collectivist stem-winder in which he invoked the rough-riding spirit of Teddy Roosevelt to call for more leveling, more government regulation of everything, and more central planning — in general, more “tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro […]
November 21, 2011 – 12:00 pm
Here’s a summary of the prospects for the Obamacare case coming up at SCOTUS. This one’s a biggie: it’s the last line of defense for those who believe that the idea of “enumerated powers” has any meaning at all.
November 20, 2011 – 7:08 pm
Well, it looks as if the deficit-reduction “supercommittee” is about to fail. Political analyst Larry Sabato tweeted: Could it really be that 12 able legislators will fail utterly at the most important task they’ll ever be asked to do? Yeah, I’m sure he’s shocked, along with the rest of us. U.S. government spending is an […]
November 18, 2011 – 11:03 pm
Here’s a dark item by Victor Hanson on the supple reality inhabited by our chief executive.
November 9, 2011 – 12:06 pm
…15¢ to pay for “a new Federal program to improve the image and marketing of Christmas trees”. Story here. (Or maybe here.) (HT: Drudge.) — Update! No doubt due to the uproar generated by this post, the administration is now reconsidering.
November 5, 2011 – 1:13 pm
Here’s Juan Williams, formerly of NPR, responding to the storm of criticism that Herman Cain has faced from liberal black commentators. Everybody’s wondering who was behind the airing of the sexual-harassment allegations against Mr. Cain. I’m inclined to doubt that Barack Obama’s organization is responsible, because it would serve their cause far better to wait […]
October 31, 2011 – 10:03 pm
The Social Security system is now cash-negative, as reported today in the Washington Post. The shortfall will henceforward steepen sharply, as hordes of my own demographic cohort enter the twilight decades of unproductive geezerdom. Rick Perry was bastinadoed in the press for calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme”, but it’s hard to see in what […]
October 30, 2011 – 1:32 pm
Are you a bluestocking conservative appalled by the ill-bred riff-raff on the GOP ticket? Worried that those Tea Party rabble are steering dangerously close to the wind, with too much sail and too little keel? You’re not alone — the same concerns have darkened cocktail-hour chats from Amagansett to Edgartown, from Princeton to Pawling to […]
October 27, 2011 – 11:28 am
Over at the AEI blog, a new piece by Jim Pethokoukis calls into question some received wisdom about income inequality. Disappointingly, it carries a provocative title — 7 Reasons Why Obama Is Wrong About Income Inequality — but then, as one reader points out in the the comment thread, completely neglects to cite the particular […]
October 26, 2011 – 9:27 am
Just in from ABC News: Obama warns us that if he loses in 2012 the US could be facing a “painful era of self-reliance”, and that we Americans would be “on our own”. If that frightens more people than it elates, this nation is doomed. * * * Update: In this afternoon’s Best of the Web, james […]
October 19, 2011 – 6:43 pm
The Texan pastor Robert Jeffress caused quite a ruction last week with his endorsement of Rick Perry for the GOP nod. Mr. Jeffress said that he thought all good Christians should prefer a Christian as their president, and that in his opinion this disqualified Mitt Romney — because the “cult” of Mormonism is something other […]
October 19, 2011 – 6:00 pm
Despite his strong position in the polls, Herman Cain may suddenly have a real problem on his hands. According to this item in the New York Times, his behavior has clearly strayed beyond what is approved and permitted for a member of his race. (Even beyond running as a Republican, I mean, which is of […]
October 7, 2011 – 10:59 pm
In our previous post about OWS, we linked to an item that’s been making the rounds today: this Huffington Post grumble from lesbian “electronic punk” musician JD Samson, who has become dissatisfied with how things are working out for her, affluence-wise. NRO’s Daniel Foster has add some pointed commentary over at the Corner. An excerpt: […]
October 7, 2011 – 3:10 pm
The weather being particularly fine here in New York this week, with Gotham’s hibernal sleet and snow still well over the horizon, the occupation of Wall Street is humming along nicely, and has the attention of everyone in the chattering classes. (Including, obviously, my own.) As longtime readers will know, the lovely Nina and I […]
September 30, 2011 – 9:27 pm
What’s the worst thing a person can be? No, no, not that. Way worse than that. Oh, that? Not even close. Once upon a time, maybe… What, that??? You’ve got to be kidding. That’s about the best thing you could be, these days. Want to get into college? Want a government job? Want to be […]
September 27, 2011 – 11:15 pm
Chris Christie made a speech today at the Reagan Library. Mr. Christie has until now made it quite clear that he will not be running for president in 2012, saying that he isn’t ready yet, and also that he owes it to the electorate in New Jersey to do the job they gave him. Now […]
September 20, 2011 – 10:18 pm
For tonight, here’s a pair of caustic items: Barry Rubin on the Palestinian gambit at the U.N., and a scathing editorial from the National Review on the President’s tax proposal. Comments are open, and readers may rant if they feel the need to, but I’m headed into a busy couple of days and am unlikely […]
September 8, 2011 – 11:08 pm
It was the first of two long days for me, and I didn’t get home in time to watch the Speech. I did read it, though. If I understand it correctly, there’s a bill Mr. Obama wants Congress to pass. Right away. If for any reason you don’t think that’s a good idea, you are […]
August 11, 2011 – 4:18 pm
What’s the biggest problem facing America today? What’s the Obama administration’s top priority? Jobs, you say? The economy? Of course not, silly! It’s carbon.
Winston Churchill was, in my opinion, the greatest statesman and wartime leader of the 20th century, and America’s surest friend since Lafayette. In the aftermath of 9/11, the UK sent a bust of Churchill to the President, as token of enduring solidarity from our closest and most natural ally among all the nations of the […]
Well, we got our debt-limit increase. It’s a fantastic piece of legislation: it starts right off by “saving” almost a trillion dollars over the next ten years. (We’ll borrow that much in the next nine months, but hey: politics is the “art of the possible”.) Next, I think we should take care of the drunk-driving […]
Here’s Paul Krugman talking to Christine Amanpour this morning about spending cuts: “From the perspective of a rational person — in other words a progressive…” If you want to foreclose on civil discourse, to go beyond argument to mere polemic, to whip up bitter factional antipathies, to make the process of democratic government little more […]
Blogger Iowahawk tweets: Instead of car that gets 55 miles per gallon, how about a govt that gets 180 minutes per billion? I like that: minutes per billion as a measure of government bloat. Currently we get about 137 MPB.
Dear Mayor Bloomberg: According to Scientific American, a meta-analysis of seven studies of the effects of salt consumption finds little or no health benefit from reduced-sodium diets. Would you mind calling off the mutaween?
The investing website Seeking Alpha has published a transcript of CEO Steve Wynn’s remarks during the Q&A portion of Wynn Resorts’s Q2 conference call yesterday. A notable excerpt: Well, here’s our problem. There are a host of opportunities for expansion in Las Vegas, a host of opportunities to create tens of thousands of jobs in […]
Sadly, the BULB Act, H.R. 2417 (see our earlier post here) died in the House the other day. Due to some procedural maneuvering the only way to bring it to the floor for a vote was in such a way as to require a two-thirds majority, and it fell slightly short. (This was in part […]
I haven’t said much about the debt-limit squabble, for at least two reasons: First, what’s the point of having a debt limit anyway, if it just gets raised whenever we approach it? Second, in the real world, as Kevin Williamson points out here, the only meaningful debt limit isn’t one that you impose upon yourself; […]
I’m happy to report that the BULB Act — a cheeky little bill that would have preserved for Americans the freedom to buy whatever kind of light bulbs they like for use in their own homes — now appears unlikely to pass. Well, good. It was a dumb move anyway. After all, our leaders have […]
As you probably know, President Obama hosted a Q&A session on Twitter yesterday. The acerbic blogger Iowahawk presented a list of questions, none of which were presented to POTUS, which is a shame, because some of them are awfully good. Go and read them here.
Today brings another provocative essay by Victor Davis Hanson, this time on the hypocrisy of socialist elites. (I know I’ve been reposting a lot of VDH lately, but he’s been on rather a tear, I think.) Excerpts: This discussion is, of course, a belabored example of why and how socialists do not like socialism. Indeed, […]
Here, for once, is a sensible piece of legislation. It has no chance of passing.
Here’s a pungent partisan punchline, from a president who could actually tell a joke.
San Francisco is considering a ban on circumcision. In support of this initiative, prepuce protectionists in the City by the Bay have published a comic book that may look eerily familiar to European immigrants of a certain age. It has attracted considerable attention, and rightly so. Here.
Here’s some common sense about taxes and the welfare state, from William Voegeli.
If you missed it: here’s Prime Minister Netanyahu, explaining reality yesterday after his conversation with the President.
April 29, 2011 – 12:09 pm
In the latest New Yorker there’s an article by Ryan Lizza called “Leading from Behind”, which presents the President’s recent foreign-policy tactics as a way to do things without exposing ourselves to charges of unilateralist swagger. In a recent blog entry, Lizza explains: …at the heart of the idea of leading from behind is the […]
Not swooning over the One the way you used to? Do his declamatory cadences no longer give you that old thrill up your leg? Is the bloom off the rose? Is the honeymoon over? Are you bored with the hat, and looking for some cattle? Wish you’d ordered steak instead of sizzle? Andrew Malcolm understands.
April 26, 2011 – 10:08 pm
For colleges, men’s sports are often hugely profitable, while women’s sports nearly always aren’t. This caused many schools not to support women’s sports at nearly the same level as men’s. Add to that the fact that far fewer young women than men are even interested in joining college sports teams — due, no doubt, to […]
Are deeds objective? If an agent performs some action X, then X influences the world’s causal network in some particular way, with particular consequences. Does it make sense to say that for the same X, X is good if performed by “good” agent Smith, and X is bad if performed by “bad” agent Jones? Why […]
April 21, 2011 – 10:55 pm
A hot topic at the moment is taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood. Social and fiscal conservatives have allied themselves against it — the former because they think abortion is murder, the latter because they don’t think what Planned Parenthood does is among the government’s enumerated functions, and it costs money. Liberals support it, for all […]
April 20, 2011 – 11:13 pm
I haven’t written much about this — I hate to get involved in this sort of thing, and prefer to focus on matters of genuine significance — but I must come out and say that it’s downright weird that the great big noisy fuss about the circumstances of President Obama’s birth hasn’t gone away. It […]
April 19, 2011 – 10:40 pm
I’ve been busy, so for tonight, with the budget debate on everybody’s mind, just a brief item: a post by statistician William Briggs that has as its central feature a starkly simple graph, devoid of any ideological content. It merely plots the amount spent by the US government per capita, year by year, in inflation-adjusted […]
April 18, 2011 – 10:46 am
As I write, the Dow is collapsing; it’s down 237 points, and heading south. The reason? Standard and Poor’s has downgraded its long-term outlook for the US to “negative”. The reason for that? Simply put, we’ve utterly failed to demonstrate that we are serious about controlling our exploding public debt. We’ve been hurtling toward a […]
April 14, 2011 – 11:22 am
The conservative blogosphere is abuzz over Nancy Pelosi’s revealing remark that “Elections shouldn’t matter as much as they do.” A sample here, from Steven Hayward at Powerline.
Here’s the latest stab at a neurological explanation of political attitudes: a study that associates conservatism with larger amygdalas, and liberalism with larger anterior cingulate gyruses. We read: Based on what is known about the functions of those two brain regions, the structural differences are consistent with reports showing a greater ability of liberals to […]
David Brooks, with whom I agree sporadically, published a pretty good item about multilateralism in today’s Times. Throughout history strong nations, ruled by confident men, reckoned their interests, and having weighed them, acted. No longer. As a modern Western democracy, America — despite having achieved in recent decades a supremacy of power without historical precedent […]
This is good: Rand Paul confronts Kathleen Hogan, the Deputy Assistant Energy Secretary for Efficiency, on light bulbs, toilets, and bureaucratic busybodies.
February 21, 2011 – 11:48 pm
If you haven’t heard, the University of Arizona will announce on Monday the establishment of a new alma mater, to be called the Institute for Civil Discourse. The effort to institutionalize its important new curriculum — which will target militaristic metaphors, contumacious dissent-mongering, and other unseemly manifestations of political faction — was triggered by the […]